Highly aromatic and sensual, this novel pale ale delivers a fresh hop flavor like no other brew. Its secret? Fresh hops piled into our boiling kettle just hours after their harvest. With many more of their essential oils intact, these ‘wet’ hops add glorious middle notes of juicy, fruit and tea-like bite to play off of its lightly toasted malt character deliciously.

M: Active carbonation, chewy malts, with a big dry touch of hops on the tongue.

O: Overall a big, fresh, wet nose, with a good complexity of dry grassy hopping and dry tropical fruits that stay on the tongue long after the swallow. Labeled as a APA but clearly has the an overclocking of hops on par with IPA standards with a huge helping of bitterness and flavor hops. ABV% is perfectly suited. Drink fresh.

APPEARANCE: This looks like a shiny, copper penny…well, one that you can see through…and with lots of bubbles. The head is eggshell white and about a half-inch thick. It does not stick around too long, but it also doesn’t settle all that much. The cap is more like a gradually sloping valley with the lowest point inside the rim being the exact center of the glass.

SMELL: The fresh cut grass on this is as intense as I have smelled since the first time I stuck my nose into a glass of Half Acre Daisy Cutter. Dank, piney and citrusy as well; this beer smells absolutely amazing.

TASTE: Earthy, herbal, “tea-like” (exactly like the label says) and citrusy. This is a largely bitter beer with just a hint of malt for balance. This is what I imagine (or wish) hops would taste like if I just put them in a juicer and squeezed.

MOUTHFEEL: The carbonation provides a strong sparkle, but with tiny bubbles, not quite a soda water-like sparkle. The body is medium to light and while a touch of sweetness provides balance, this beer is on the dry side…and pretty bitter.

OVERALL: This is what I remember the first few IPAs I fell in love with tasting like. I was going for as bitter as possible and beers like this were the reason why. The juicy, earthy, intense hop flavor is why I drink hoppy beers. This beer is still well within it’s ‘enjoy by’ date of March 10 and it seems to have been stored perfectly, but my only regret is that I did not pick it up when it was fresher. Not sure how much better it could have been, but I would have liked to have known for sure. Amazing beer.

This was served from the bottle at the Intercontinental Hotel at the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. Actually, we enjoyed this in our room, having brought it along with us to enjoy after attending to our business in Cleveland. We borrowed some house pint glasses, and poured a beer of ruby-honey hues. It held a finger and a half’s worth of eggshell colored foam, showing decent retention. This left doily patterns of lacing all down our glasses throughout the tasting. No haze or sediment was noted, and carbonation appeared to be moderate. The aroma popped off white grape skins, freshly juicy citric and herbal hops, sweaty pale and amber malts, green corn husks, lemongrass, wet sage herbals, darker tea-like tannins, juicy pineapple and papaya fruitiness, raw and fresh honey sweetness, spicy white pepper, lightly fusel booziness, and a more sticky pine sap as the beer warmed. The flavoring followed with notes of surprisingly bittering pale and amber malt toast, sweet and savory herbal, floral, and citric hoppiness, hibiscus florals, aromatic sage and parsley leafiness, honey sweetness, bittering white wine grape skins, juicy pear and apricot fruitiness, potato starchiness, powdered chalkiness of ale yeast, lemon balm, bitter lemon zest, fusel alcohol, green twigginess, and clayed mineral. The body was medium to full, and carbonation was medium. Slurp and smack were nice off the top of the sip, while cream and froth were only okay beneath it. The feel was otherwise oily, sticky, and resinously drying to the tongue and palate, broken up warmly by just enough carbonation. The abv was appropriate, and drinkability was nice.

Overall, this was an extremely flavorful and dankly sticky beer. The wet hopping gives it all the zest and zip of its freshly-hopped brother, the American IPA, but tucked into the vessel of an American pale. We’ve been excited about this one for quite some time now, with all of our beer loving compatriots berating us for delaying our sampling of this fine beverage. We have finally found it, and the timing was right to drink it. We were not disappointed. This is just a wonderfully fresh and clean beer, with malty toast that easily meets the challenge of balancing such an otherwise hop-heavy deliver. On top of it all, it makes us really happy to see some of these “bigger”, or “classic”, craft breweries like Victory keeping things relevant, competitive, and innovative.